The State of the Church (2002)
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island
Sunday January 27, 2002
***
Early in my career, I got into the habit of preaching on the topic of “the State of the Church” on the Sunday of the Annual Business Meeting. And I have to confess that part of my motivation, at least in those early days, was simply laziness (or, if you prefer, the desire to work smarter rather than harder). But I figured that, as long as I had to give an annual report anyway, I might as well leverage my efforts a little and get a sermon out of it as well, (killing two birds with one stone, as it were), and also saving everyone a lot of time, (which on a Sunday when the Patriots are playing to advance to the Super Bowl, I hope will be much appreciated).
But I also came to see over time that there was another good reason for preaching once a year on “the State of the Church,” and that is that it allows me an opportunity to talk about the relationship between the spiritual and the temporal in our religious lives (or, if you prefer, between the Sacred and the Mundane).
Ordinarily when I talk about spirituality I like to speak in terms of Inspiration and Aspiration: the intuitive knowledge, in our heart of hearts, that there is more to this life than meets the eye, and then the desire we feel to obtain it or achieve it: to make our vision of things not seen visible and tangible in the real world. And this brings us to a third manifestation of the spirit, which I like to call “Perspiration” -- the hard work we do in the world to make our aspirations a reality. Or to put it another way, the mundane things we do from day to day to keep this church going from year to year have a sacred dimension: they are the tangible expression of our values and principles lived out in daily life.
Now, having just said all that, let me go on to say, judging from everything I that have seen and heard here in my brief time among you as your interim minister, that the State of this Church is Good. Obviously, as an interim, I have a limited ability to compare what is happening here now to what has happened here before, but I also have the advantage of being able to compare what I am seeing here to what I have seen in other churches around the country, and I see a lot to like. This is not to say that you don’t have any challenges (or, if you prefer, opportunities for improvement). But when I look around I see a terrific music program, led by a talented and hard-working Music Director, and well-attended Sunday Services (even in the dead of winter). I see a small but dynamic Religious Education program, once again led by creative and dedicated individuals, who are committed to giving the children of this congregation a quality experience every Sunday morning. And they have great dreams for the future. I see an active Membership Committee working in a variety of different ways to create interesting opportunities for fellowship and social interaction, and a Personnel Committee committed to providing competitive salaries and excellent working conditions for all our church employees. I see the hard work of the Board of Trustees, the Finance Committee, the Ministerial Search Committee, the Committee on Ministry; mostly, I see all of you, wearing your different hats at different times, each of you participating in your own way, in ways too numerous to recount. And this is good. Because you ARE this congregation, and your enthusiastic participation is what makes South Church what it is.
Interim ministry is supposed to be about Transition. But it is also about Transformation, and that is the part that makes it more complicated than simply replacing one professional religious leader with another. The interim period is a time for taking stock and making plans: for looking at your past in order to discover what it might teach you about your future; for articulating a new identity; based on a new generation of leadership (and not just new ministerial leadership, but new lay leadership as well); it’s about rediscovering your connections to the larger Unitarian Universalist movement; and articulating new opportunities for growth, for service and for outreach.
Interim ministry is all about change, and on a lot of different levels: embracing the things about your past that you want to carry forward into the future, discarding the things that you have learned you can do without, and then being prepared to build upon that new foundation in partnership with a new minister, whom you have freely chosen for yourselves. It’s an exciting time, but it is not without its perils, because, let’s face it, even the most congenial group of people don’t always see eye-to-eye on every little thing, and one person’s excess baggage may very well turn out to be another’s priceless heirloom. But these are the kinds of issues that need to be worked out during the “transition time,” when you have the freedom to experiment a little, and try on new things just to see how well they fit.
The process of Transformation begins with the transition, but it obviously doesn’t just abruptly end when the transition is completed. Transformation is an on-going process, which will only accelerate once your new minister begins to settle in. And this is why it is so important to look ahead now, so that when your new minister finally does arrive, they will be able to lead you to the place you want to go.
I want to talk a little more specifically now about three different issues facing this congregation this afternoon, and in the days ahead. For some of you, this will be old news, while others may be hearing it for the first time, but I thought I would just sort of put it all out on the table, so that we all might start on the same page. And the first of these issues has to do with the budget. I know some of you were in church a few weeks ago when Brian announced the preliminary results of the every-member canvass, and I could feel the reaction to his announcement, because I know at first blush it sounded like we had fallen considerably short of our goal. Well, as it turns out, that wasn’t entirely so. Part of the problem was simply a book-keeping error (although nothing nearly so egregious as what is happening now down in Houston concerning Enron), but apparently last year there were some fairly significant one-time contributions which somehow got lumped in with the regular pledges, which made that number look considerably larger than it really was.
But there is also the fact that, for various reasons, it looks like we will have about 20% fewer contributors this year than we did after last year’s campaign. Some of this is simply due to normal attrition: people who have died, or moved away from the Island. Some of it is due to the changed economic situation following September 11th, which has left a lot of folks really struggling to make ends meet. And some of it as well is probably a reflection of the natural “slimming down” that congregations often go through during times of transition, as some folks tend to take a step back while they wait and see how it’s all going to turn out. The good news is that, for those folks who did pledge, the amount of their contributions has tended to go up -- in some cases, quite dramatically. So (and I hope there’s no one here who is offended by this metaphor -- it’s just the way my mind happens to be working these days), we have lost a few pounds, but we have also gained a little muscle, and I predict that this trend will only continue to improve as you continue to gain experience at running an annual pledge campaign.
Furthermore (again in part because of these one-time contributions), the church actually ended its fiscal year with a fairly healthy cash surplus, which will more than cover any anticipated shortfall in the canvass goal. Finally, thanks to a very significant bequest which not even an Arthur Anderson auditor could have possibly mistaken for a pledge, the total endowment funds of this congregation now stand at approximately one million dollars. A big endowment can often be something of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, having a million dollars in the bank can open up a lot of new opportunities for a congregation, as well as providing a very healthy cushion against future hard times. But it can also sometimes leave folks a little reluctant to dig deeply into their own pockets in order to pay the price of their current program through their own efforts. When you look at the budget, you will see that approximately half of this church’s revenue comes from two sources: income from the endowment, and the rental of the church tower; a healthier ratio might be closer to one-third. So you can see, there is still some work to be done in this area. Even so, the bottom line is that this congregation is on very solid financial footing, and that is very much to your credit.
The second thing I want to talk about is the progress of your ministerial search. Once again, I know that a lot of you were here in church a few weeks ago when Kat announced that one of your ministerial pre-candidates had decided to withdraw, leaving you with only one remaining pre-candidate, and a couple of other profiles to review. Personally, this is one of those pieces of information that I would have just as soon the committee had decided to keep under their hats, since it really is kind of discouraging, and there is nothing that the rest of us can do about it anyway, but now that it’s out there, let me just say a few words about it.
Searching for a new minister can sometimes be a very long and arduous process. But the most important thing is not how long the process takes, but rather that you end up with the right candidate at the end of your search, because the only thing worse than not being able to call a new minister right away is making the mistake of calling the wrong one. You have an excellent search committee in place, and you have an excellent situation to offer your next minister; there are a lot of excellent ministers in this denomination, and frankly I’m a little astonished that you haven’t been overwhelmed by applicants. But it only takes one, provided it’s the right one, and if for some reason it turns out that your search committee should decide not to present you with a candidate this spring, it’s not the end of the world: it just means a little more waiting, and a little more work, until they eventually succeed at the important task with which you have charged them. And you also need to give them the support and the encouragement, as well as the time and space, to do their job effectively. Trust their judgment, and trust yourselves, because you truly do have a wonderful church, and Nantucket truly is a wonderful place to be a Unitarian minister.
There’s one last thing I want to talk about, and I’m a little reluctant even to bring it up (which is probably a sure sign that I’d better), but one of the surprising bits of information that came back from the annual canvass was how much lingering pain -- and even anger -- is still out there concerning the failed ministry of Bob Thayer. I don’t know Bob -- I’ve never met him, and I wouldn’t presume to judge him even if I had. I do know that he disappointed a lot of people in this congregation, and that there are others who were disappointed by the abrupt manner in which he left. And I can see as well (as an historian, well after the fact) where he made some bad mistakes, and I also suspect that, on some level at least, he was probably a lot better minister than his experience here would indicate. As I was saying to Ted the other day, none of us walk on water, but most of us know better than to keep on walking against a rising tide until it sweeps us off our feet and carries us out to sea. And no new minister, however gifted, will ever know where the scallops are the way that Ted does. Unless, of course, you are willing to take the time to show them. And they are willing to take the time to listen.
But the point I want to make is this: most success in life is actually built on a gigantic mountain of failures, and whatever success I have enjoyed here in my ministry on this island has in some ways been easier because of Bob’s disappointing ministry here. And I don’t think it’s just a matter of looking good by comparison. Rather, I think that your experience with Bob changed you in some important ways: it made you more cautious, it made you look at yourselves from a different perspective, it alerted you to the fact that failure was a possibility, and that you needed to work that much harder and more intentionally in order to avoid it. And I have been the beneficiary of all of that.
Or to put it another way, it’s a lot easier to walk around a gaping crater than it is to avoid a hidden land mine, especially if it’s been buried so long that most folks have forgotten all about it. Ministry is a difficult vocation; people often take pot-shots even at the best of us, for reasons known only to themselves. After thirty years in any parish there is typically a lot of “unexploded ordnance” lying around -- dangerous issues that folks have tacitly agreed just to leave alone, because the cost of resolving them is simply too high. The minister emeritus might remember where they all are (especially since he was probably the original target of a lot of it in the first place), but often no one else does, unless it effects them personally. Whatever else you may want to say about his ministry, Bob showed you the hard way where a lot of that stuff was buried. And now he’s gone, and it’s time to begin to reach out the healing hand to one another in his absence.
A little earlier this morning I spoke briefly about the three “manifestations of the Spirit” that characterize the day-to-day life of the church, and the on-going quest to make our vision of the possible an everyday reality: inspiration, aspiration, and perspiration. But there is also a fourth manifestation, which I like to think of as “respiration” (or as my father used to put it, the ability to “relax and breathe through your nose”). There are some problems in life that truly can be solved simply by getting a bigger hammer: by going back at it again and again with an ever-greater effort, until you are finally able to overcome whatever obstacles lie in your path, and achieve your goal. But as the saying goes, when your only tool is a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail -- and that can often leave you with even a bigger mess than you started with.
Sometimes it’s important to be able to take a step back and look at things from a different perspective -- to relax, to take a deep breath, to contemplate whether maybe there isn’t a better way of going about your task, and then returning to it with renewed effort, and the right tool, and a better plan. I’m not saying that you are facing that kind of situation now; that’s for you to decide, not for me. But one of the great advantages of an interim period is that it gives you permission to “think outside the box,” to try new ways of doing things which may or may not actually work out, but which you ought to try anyway just to see how you like it.
And likewise, as I have told so many of the congregations I have worked with as they stood in trepidation on the threshold of a whole new era in their history, the one great advantage of talk being cheap is that you can afford to do a lot of it. This is the great miracle of democracy: that we begin with a multitude of ideas and opinions, and then, through free discussion and dialog, eventually come to a meeting of the minds. I’ve had my say now, for what it’s worth. I look forward to sitting quietly in the back of the room and listening to all of you later this afternoon, as you engage in one of the most important and sacred activities known to our free church tradition: the convening of your congregation’s Annual Business Meeting.
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island
Sunday January 27, 2002
***
Early in my career, I got into the habit of preaching on the topic of “the State of the Church” on the Sunday of the Annual Business Meeting. And I have to confess that part of my motivation, at least in those early days, was simply laziness (or, if you prefer, the desire to work smarter rather than harder). But I figured that, as long as I had to give an annual report anyway, I might as well leverage my efforts a little and get a sermon out of it as well, (killing two birds with one stone, as it were), and also saving everyone a lot of time, (which on a Sunday when the Patriots are playing to advance to the Super Bowl, I hope will be much appreciated).
But I also came to see over time that there was another good reason for preaching once a year on “the State of the Church,” and that is that it allows me an opportunity to talk about the relationship between the spiritual and the temporal in our religious lives (or, if you prefer, between the Sacred and the Mundane).
Ordinarily when I talk about spirituality I like to speak in terms of Inspiration and Aspiration: the intuitive knowledge, in our heart of hearts, that there is more to this life than meets the eye, and then the desire we feel to obtain it or achieve it: to make our vision of things not seen visible and tangible in the real world. And this brings us to a third manifestation of the spirit, which I like to call “Perspiration” -- the hard work we do in the world to make our aspirations a reality. Or to put it another way, the mundane things we do from day to day to keep this church going from year to year have a sacred dimension: they are the tangible expression of our values and principles lived out in daily life.
Now, having just said all that, let me go on to say, judging from everything I that have seen and heard here in my brief time among you as your interim minister, that the State of this Church is Good. Obviously, as an interim, I have a limited ability to compare what is happening here now to what has happened here before, but I also have the advantage of being able to compare what I am seeing here to what I have seen in other churches around the country, and I see a lot to like. This is not to say that you don’t have any challenges (or, if you prefer, opportunities for improvement). But when I look around I see a terrific music program, led by a talented and hard-working Music Director, and well-attended Sunday Services (even in the dead of winter). I see a small but dynamic Religious Education program, once again led by creative and dedicated individuals, who are committed to giving the children of this congregation a quality experience every Sunday morning. And they have great dreams for the future. I see an active Membership Committee working in a variety of different ways to create interesting opportunities for fellowship and social interaction, and a Personnel Committee committed to providing competitive salaries and excellent working conditions for all our church employees. I see the hard work of the Board of Trustees, the Finance Committee, the Ministerial Search Committee, the Committee on Ministry; mostly, I see all of you, wearing your different hats at different times, each of you participating in your own way, in ways too numerous to recount. And this is good. Because you ARE this congregation, and your enthusiastic participation is what makes South Church what it is.
Interim ministry is supposed to be about Transition. But it is also about Transformation, and that is the part that makes it more complicated than simply replacing one professional religious leader with another. The interim period is a time for taking stock and making plans: for looking at your past in order to discover what it might teach you about your future; for articulating a new identity; based on a new generation of leadership (and not just new ministerial leadership, but new lay leadership as well); it’s about rediscovering your connections to the larger Unitarian Universalist movement; and articulating new opportunities for growth, for service and for outreach.
Interim ministry is all about change, and on a lot of different levels: embracing the things about your past that you want to carry forward into the future, discarding the things that you have learned you can do without, and then being prepared to build upon that new foundation in partnership with a new minister, whom you have freely chosen for yourselves. It’s an exciting time, but it is not without its perils, because, let’s face it, even the most congenial group of people don’t always see eye-to-eye on every little thing, and one person’s excess baggage may very well turn out to be another’s priceless heirloom. But these are the kinds of issues that need to be worked out during the “transition time,” when you have the freedom to experiment a little, and try on new things just to see how well they fit.
The process of Transformation begins with the transition, but it obviously doesn’t just abruptly end when the transition is completed. Transformation is an on-going process, which will only accelerate once your new minister begins to settle in. And this is why it is so important to look ahead now, so that when your new minister finally does arrive, they will be able to lead you to the place you want to go.
I want to talk a little more specifically now about three different issues facing this congregation this afternoon, and in the days ahead. For some of you, this will be old news, while others may be hearing it for the first time, but I thought I would just sort of put it all out on the table, so that we all might start on the same page. And the first of these issues has to do with the budget. I know some of you were in church a few weeks ago when Brian announced the preliminary results of the every-member canvass, and I could feel the reaction to his announcement, because I know at first blush it sounded like we had fallen considerably short of our goal. Well, as it turns out, that wasn’t entirely so. Part of the problem was simply a book-keeping error (although nothing nearly so egregious as what is happening now down in Houston concerning Enron), but apparently last year there were some fairly significant one-time contributions which somehow got lumped in with the regular pledges, which made that number look considerably larger than it really was.
But there is also the fact that, for various reasons, it looks like we will have about 20% fewer contributors this year than we did after last year’s campaign. Some of this is simply due to normal attrition: people who have died, or moved away from the Island. Some of it is due to the changed economic situation following September 11th, which has left a lot of folks really struggling to make ends meet. And some of it as well is probably a reflection of the natural “slimming down” that congregations often go through during times of transition, as some folks tend to take a step back while they wait and see how it’s all going to turn out. The good news is that, for those folks who did pledge, the amount of their contributions has tended to go up -- in some cases, quite dramatically. So (and I hope there’s no one here who is offended by this metaphor -- it’s just the way my mind happens to be working these days), we have lost a few pounds, but we have also gained a little muscle, and I predict that this trend will only continue to improve as you continue to gain experience at running an annual pledge campaign.
Furthermore (again in part because of these one-time contributions), the church actually ended its fiscal year with a fairly healthy cash surplus, which will more than cover any anticipated shortfall in the canvass goal. Finally, thanks to a very significant bequest which not even an Arthur Anderson auditor could have possibly mistaken for a pledge, the total endowment funds of this congregation now stand at approximately one million dollars. A big endowment can often be something of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, having a million dollars in the bank can open up a lot of new opportunities for a congregation, as well as providing a very healthy cushion against future hard times. But it can also sometimes leave folks a little reluctant to dig deeply into their own pockets in order to pay the price of their current program through their own efforts. When you look at the budget, you will see that approximately half of this church’s revenue comes from two sources: income from the endowment, and the rental of the church tower; a healthier ratio might be closer to one-third. So you can see, there is still some work to be done in this area. Even so, the bottom line is that this congregation is on very solid financial footing, and that is very much to your credit.
The second thing I want to talk about is the progress of your ministerial search. Once again, I know that a lot of you were here in church a few weeks ago when Kat announced that one of your ministerial pre-candidates had decided to withdraw, leaving you with only one remaining pre-candidate, and a couple of other profiles to review. Personally, this is one of those pieces of information that I would have just as soon the committee had decided to keep under their hats, since it really is kind of discouraging, and there is nothing that the rest of us can do about it anyway, but now that it’s out there, let me just say a few words about it.
Searching for a new minister can sometimes be a very long and arduous process. But the most important thing is not how long the process takes, but rather that you end up with the right candidate at the end of your search, because the only thing worse than not being able to call a new minister right away is making the mistake of calling the wrong one. You have an excellent search committee in place, and you have an excellent situation to offer your next minister; there are a lot of excellent ministers in this denomination, and frankly I’m a little astonished that you haven’t been overwhelmed by applicants. But it only takes one, provided it’s the right one, and if for some reason it turns out that your search committee should decide not to present you with a candidate this spring, it’s not the end of the world: it just means a little more waiting, and a little more work, until they eventually succeed at the important task with which you have charged them. And you also need to give them the support and the encouragement, as well as the time and space, to do their job effectively. Trust their judgment, and trust yourselves, because you truly do have a wonderful church, and Nantucket truly is a wonderful place to be a Unitarian minister.
There’s one last thing I want to talk about, and I’m a little reluctant even to bring it up (which is probably a sure sign that I’d better), but one of the surprising bits of information that came back from the annual canvass was how much lingering pain -- and even anger -- is still out there concerning the failed ministry of Bob Thayer. I don’t know Bob -- I’ve never met him, and I wouldn’t presume to judge him even if I had. I do know that he disappointed a lot of people in this congregation, and that there are others who were disappointed by the abrupt manner in which he left. And I can see as well (as an historian, well after the fact) where he made some bad mistakes, and I also suspect that, on some level at least, he was probably a lot better minister than his experience here would indicate. As I was saying to Ted the other day, none of us walk on water, but most of us know better than to keep on walking against a rising tide until it sweeps us off our feet and carries us out to sea. And no new minister, however gifted, will ever know where the scallops are the way that Ted does. Unless, of course, you are willing to take the time to show them. And they are willing to take the time to listen.
But the point I want to make is this: most success in life is actually built on a gigantic mountain of failures, and whatever success I have enjoyed here in my ministry on this island has in some ways been easier because of Bob’s disappointing ministry here. And I don’t think it’s just a matter of looking good by comparison. Rather, I think that your experience with Bob changed you in some important ways: it made you more cautious, it made you look at yourselves from a different perspective, it alerted you to the fact that failure was a possibility, and that you needed to work that much harder and more intentionally in order to avoid it. And I have been the beneficiary of all of that.
Or to put it another way, it’s a lot easier to walk around a gaping crater than it is to avoid a hidden land mine, especially if it’s been buried so long that most folks have forgotten all about it. Ministry is a difficult vocation; people often take pot-shots even at the best of us, for reasons known only to themselves. After thirty years in any parish there is typically a lot of “unexploded ordnance” lying around -- dangerous issues that folks have tacitly agreed just to leave alone, because the cost of resolving them is simply too high. The minister emeritus might remember where they all are (especially since he was probably the original target of a lot of it in the first place), but often no one else does, unless it effects them personally. Whatever else you may want to say about his ministry, Bob showed you the hard way where a lot of that stuff was buried. And now he’s gone, and it’s time to begin to reach out the healing hand to one another in his absence.
A little earlier this morning I spoke briefly about the three “manifestations of the Spirit” that characterize the day-to-day life of the church, and the on-going quest to make our vision of the possible an everyday reality: inspiration, aspiration, and perspiration. But there is also a fourth manifestation, which I like to think of as “respiration” (or as my father used to put it, the ability to “relax and breathe through your nose”). There are some problems in life that truly can be solved simply by getting a bigger hammer: by going back at it again and again with an ever-greater effort, until you are finally able to overcome whatever obstacles lie in your path, and achieve your goal. But as the saying goes, when your only tool is a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail -- and that can often leave you with even a bigger mess than you started with.
Sometimes it’s important to be able to take a step back and look at things from a different perspective -- to relax, to take a deep breath, to contemplate whether maybe there isn’t a better way of going about your task, and then returning to it with renewed effort, and the right tool, and a better plan. I’m not saying that you are facing that kind of situation now; that’s for you to decide, not for me. But one of the great advantages of an interim period is that it gives you permission to “think outside the box,” to try new ways of doing things which may or may not actually work out, but which you ought to try anyway just to see how you like it.
And likewise, as I have told so many of the congregations I have worked with as they stood in trepidation on the threshold of a whole new era in their history, the one great advantage of talk being cheap is that you can afford to do a lot of it. This is the great miracle of democracy: that we begin with a multitude of ideas and opinions, and then, through free discussion and dialog, eventually come to a meeting of the minds. I’ve had my say now, for what it’s worth. I look forward to sitting quietly in the back of the room and listening to all of you later this afternoon, as you engage in one of the most important and sacred activities known to our free church tradition: the convening of your congregation’s Annual Business Meeting.
posted by The Eclectic Cleric at 2:22 PM
